I went out to dinner with a friend last night. It went pretty quickly, since 1) it's a busy restaurant and they tend to push you through pretty quick, and 2) we both had 2 kids we wanted to get home in order to kiss goodnight. While we were there, I ate a fantastic root veggie dish (beets, yummy!) and drank ONE beer. A normal beer. Not a triple or a double or anything fancy at all.

I actually shouldn't have had even one beer, b/c toward the end of the day, and especially on the T ride home, I wasn't feeling so well. I thought it was just motion sickness, b/c the driver of my train seemed to be competing for the title of "Most Riders Thrown Across the Train During Commute Hours." In my experience, this driver was the second runner up. But I still felt funky when I got home - after picking up the kids and walking probably .5 miles. I thought perhaps it was more than just motion sickness ....

But I never can abstain while others order a beer, so I ordered ONE with my friend.

When I got home, I felt dizzy. I think it even started at home. The room was slightly spinning. It was NOT a drunk-dizzy. I just felt .... off. Like something was kinda wrong. Then I started to feel nauseous. So I got in bed with a book, and went to sleep pretty quick, pretty early. I just conked out.

I woke a few times in the night, feeling squeamish still. I didn't go running this a.m., b/c I didn't trust my stomach, and didn't want to push it before work - I think I'd rather die than call in sick after taking a week off.

I still feel just a little off. Every now and then I feel dizzy, and my stomach feels less than stable. I had a cup of tea, and that helped, but I feel exhausted - which is probably more from the lack of early morning running-juices, rather than from a lack of sleep (since I slept long and hard last night). So I'm having coffee on top of the tea.

I was tempted to get an onion bagel with cream cheese -- "to settle the stomach" -- but I am trying so hard to stay away from white flour stuff (it goes hand-in-hand with the running), and it probably would NOT settle my stomach, so I resisted that temptation.

Now I'm at work, and I am able to read and work. So I assume I'm fine.

I had a kind of daunting conversation with a partner here I've been working with. It was about Future Firm. I sort of found through my interview process for this co-op that smaller firms LOVE to pick on the biggies. They LOVE to. I found a few small-firm partners to be quite unprofessional in their joking. Something similar to saying "ha ha - you're going to work at Crav-Ass! Get it? Cravath, CravASS?? Ha ha." [I picked them b/c they're the first firm that doesn't have a presence in Boston that popped into my mind --- not at all to imply that I'm going to work at a Cravath-type firm]. What I've gotten here is more of the "I hope you're ready for super-long hours!" and "Well, if that's the type of thing you want, more power to ya." Stuff like that. This firm isn't tiny, and they have an excellent reputation, and most of the partners and associates have come from the large firms in town (you know, when they didn't make the partner cut ... or perhaps when they got sick of the hours .... or perhaps when they decided they'd rather see the inside of a court room, rather than spend hours and hours doing discovery review).

This morning's conversation was about the unlikelihood of making partner, and how I should talk to the people here who came from Future Firm. I told her "no thank you!" I'm locked in with my offer and acceptance ... I don't want to go and listen to the reasons why it won't work out for me. I made my decision with the information available to me, and with my family's well-being in mind (financial and otherwise). I don't need to hear stories from people who perhaps made the same decision and for whatever reason --- it didn't work out. My experience won't be their experience -- it will be MY experience. I will have MY relationships with the people I work with; I will have MY chemistry with the firm and its culture.

Furthermore, the firm (as all work places) is changing. Those who graduated law school in the late 80s or early 90s went to a different place than I'm going to in '07. Geez, in the late 80s or early 90s, there's no way in hell that I would be going to Future Firm from my school. They would have laughed uproarously at the idea of hiring someone from a non-top 10. The hilarity of it!!!

I'm well aware that this path may not be a straight one. There may be plenty of curves and bumps. But it is my path. I want to go down it with hope and optimism, not regret and fear.